About EE Times China

EE Times China

EE Times China, known in Chinese as 电子工程专辑 and published at eet-china.com, is the Chinese-language edition of EE Times, the electronics engineering media brand that has served the world's electronics industry since 1972. Published for engineers in China from Shenzhen, Guangdong, it is part of the AspenCore global electronics media network, which describes itself as the world's leading media group within the technical electronics sector. The site carries semiconductor, components, embedded systems, power and test news, design articles, market research and engineer community content in Chinese, localising the parent brand's coverage for China's electronics design industry, which is concentrated in Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta.

The relationship between the editions matters. EE Times itself states that its view of the electronics industry is global, with a network of correspondents, editors and websites working around the clock in China, Europe, India and the rest of Asia. EE Times China is the Chinese node of that network: it reports on Chinese companies, design activity and markets for a Chinese engineering readership, and it feeds Chinese industry developments back into a global conversation conducted through sister editions such as EE Times and EE Times Asia.

The EE Times brand since 1972

EE Times, short for Electronic Engineering Times, was launched in the United States in 1972 by Gerard G. Leeds of CMP Publications Inc. Its own history states that since 1972 it has been delivering news and analysis geared for electrical engineers, and that over the fifty years since its founding it has remained committed to delivering content about technology, business and the profession that is accurate, insightful, useful and entertaining. Its LinkedIn profile calls it the voice of the electronics industry for nearly fifty years and the largest independent global engineering resource for design engineers, design managers, technologists and executives.

The brand's longevity spans the modern electronics era. EE Times began when design meant selecting components and fitting them together, before the first commercial microprocessor era had fully unfolded, and its own retrospective writing traces how design practice changed through medium and large-scale integration to today's system-on-chip teams. A Chinese edition inherits that institutional memory: the same title that reported the industry's first decades now reports, in Chinese, on an industry whose manufacturing and much of its design centre of gravity has moved to China.

EE Times offers design engineers and management executives news and analysis of the latest technologies and business developments in the global electronics industry, in its own summary, with award-winning journalists and subject-matter experts covering not just what happened but why it happened and what it portends. That formula, technical news written for working engineers rather than for general readers, is the template the Chinese edition follows.

Ownership: from CMP to UBM to AspenCore

The brand's ownership history explains how a Chinese edition came to sit inside an American component distributor's media arm. In 1999 the Leeds family sold CMP Publications Inc. to United Business Media for 900 million dollars, and EE Times became part of the UBM electronics media portfolio. Under UBM, the digital edition migrated in July 2013 to the DeusM community platform, and the print era ended: UBM Electronics announced in November 2012 that the December 2012 issue of EE Times would be the last in print.

On 3 June 2016, UBM announced that EE Times, along with the rest of its electronics media portfolio, including EDN, Embedded.com, TechOnline and Datasheets.com, was being sold to AspenCore Media, a company owned by Arrow Electronics and based in Centennial, Colorado, for 23.5 million dollars. The acquisition was completed on 1 August 2016, and EE Times has been owned by AspenCore, a division of Arrow Electronics, since that date.

That ownership shapes the Chinese operation. Arrow is a global distributor of electronic components, and AspenCore is its media network for the engineering audience that specifies those components. EE Times China therefore belongs to a network whose business is connecting component makers, distributors and design engineers, a structure visible in the events and awards it runs in Shenzhen, where distribution and supply-chain leadership are covered alongside pure engineering.

The AspenCore network and sister publications

AspenCore presents itself as a world-leading technical media organisation in electronic engineering, and its network places EE Times China among a family of specialist titles. EE Times lists its sister sites as Embedded.com, Planet Analog, EPSNews, EDN and TechOnline, and notes that in February 2025 EPS News, which served buyers, sellers and suppliers of components and supply-chain services, merged into EE Times. The wider AspenCore network also includes properties such as Datasheets.com, the components resource eeWeb and supply-chain data services.

Regionally, the network publishes EE Times Asia from Taipei, serving the broader Asian engineering community in English, alongside the Chinese-language EE Times China. AspenCore's own event reporting identifies Yorbe Zhang as Head of AspenCore APAC, and the Asia-Pacific operation runs the group's summits, exhibitions and awards in Shenzhen. Judging panels for its World Electronics Achievement Awards are drawn from AspenCore editors and analysts in Asia, the United States and Europe, with online voting by engineers worldwide, which gives the Chinese edition's audience a direct line into global network activities.

For a reader in Shenzhen, the practical meaning is access in Chinese to a reporting network that also covers Silicon Valley, Europe, India and Taiwan, and the ability to move between the Chinese site, the English Asian edition and the global EE Times site as a story requires.

A Chinese-language edition for China's engineers

EE Times China exists because engineering information is language-specific in practice. Datasheets, design techniques, standards and market analysis are working documents, and China's large engineering workforce works in Chinese. The Chinese name, 电子工程专辑, translates as an electronics engineering special collection or album, a title that presents the site as a curated professional resource rather than a newspaper.

The edition's job, as described in this directory's source summary, is localisation rather than simple translation. It localises the parent brand's coverage for China's electronics design industry, addressing the regional trends, innovations and challenges faced by manufacturers and engineers in China. That includes covering Chinese semiconductor companies, domestic design houses and local market conditions in depth that a global edition, writing for everyone, cannot sustain, while keeping Chinese readers current with the global technology and business developments the EE Times network reports.

Its audience is defined by profession: design engineers, engineering managers, technologists and executives in the electronics industry, the same audience definition EE Times uses globally. Students and general technology readers may use the site, but its content assumes an engineering reader, with design articles, product and technology analysis and market research pitched at people who design, specify or buy electronic systems for a living.

Semiconductor and components coverage

Semiconductors are the centre of the coverage, as they are for the whole AspenCore network. The China site and its sister editions carry news and analysis on integrated circuit design, EDA and intellectual property, foundry and packaging developments, memory, processors and the component categories engineers specify, from sensors and analogue parts to passives and connectors. AspenCore's Shenzhen summit programmes show the editorial agenda in public form: IC design, EDA and IP, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, automotive electronics, green energy, smart manufacturing and wireless connectivity were the spotlight domains at IIC Shenzhen 2025.

China-specific semiconductor coverage carries particular weight because of the country's drive for IC self-sufficiency. AspenCore's China reporting has covered, for example, the second phase of China's national integrated-circuit investment fund and its goal of an independent and controllable industrial chain, reported by named EE Times China journalists in the network's English coverage. For Chinese design engineers, such policy and funding developments are not background politics but direct determinants of which parts, tools and partners will be available to them.

Components and distribution form the second strand. The network covers component distributors and supply chains as first-order news, hosts a Global Distribution and Supply Chain Leaders Summit alongside its Shenzhen exhibition, and presents Global Electronic Component Distributor Awards selected through its editorial and audience processes. In the world's largest electronics manufacturing base, where a design is only real if its bill of materials can be sourced, that supply-chain coverage is engineering information, not trade filler.

Embedded systems, power and test coverage

Beyond chips and components, the edition's stated coverage includes embedded systems, power and test. Embedded coverage follows microcontrollers, processors, software and system design for connected and intelligent products; the network's specialist site Embedded.com reflects how substantial that field is, and its Asian conference programming covers edge AI, intelligent systems and connectivity for embedded developers.

Power coverage spans power management and power devices, a field with its own long-running AspenCore conference series in China: the programme at IIC Shenzhen 2023 included a twenty-sixth High Efficiency Power Management and Power Devices Conference, and the 2025 event included a thirtieth forum on high-efficiency power management and wide-bandgap semiconductor applications, with speakers from companies including Texas Instruments and Renesas. Wide-bandgap devices such as gallium nitride and silicon carbide, electric vehicles and AI data-centre power are recurring subjects across the network's power reporting.

Test and measurement completes the engineering workflow the site covers, from design validation to production test. Coverage in this category follows test equipment, design-for-test software and measurement techniques as products become more complex and more software-defined. Together, the semiconductor, embedded, power and test strands map onto the actual sequence of an electronics project, architecture, components, firmware, power and verification, which is how an engineering readership organises its own information needs.

Design articles, research and community

EE Times China is not only a news wire. Its remit, in the source summary for this profile, includes design articles, market research and engineer community content in Chinese. Design articles, contributed by working engineers and specialists as well as staff, explain techniques and trade-offs in depth; EE Times globally describes this contributed expert content as central to its service, offering perspectives on the technology and business issues that shape the industry.

Market research gives engineering readers the commercial frame for technical choices: which end markets are growing, how component demand and pricing are moving, and where Chinese and global manufacturers are investing. Research and analysis from firms across the industry appears throughout the AspenCore network's coverage, and the China edition applies that material to the market its readers sell into.

Community is the third element. The EE Times digital edition was an early adopter of community-platform publishing in the UBM era, and the AspenCore network continues to build engineer community features, discussion and voting, most visibly in awards programmes where engineers worldwide vote alongside editorial judging panels. For a professional audience, that peer dimension, engineers reading, judging and debating other engineers' work, is part of what distinguishes a vertical media brand from a news feed.

Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta audience

The edition is published from Shenzhen, in Guangdong, and the choice of city is the story in miniature. Shenzhen was designated one of China's first special economic zones in 1980 and grew from a small coastal settlement into a global electronics manufacturing and design centre, home to companies including Huawei, Tencent, DJI and BYD and to thousands of smaller electronics firms and start-ups, component suppliers and factories. Its hardware ecosystem lets companies design, prototype and move into production within the same region, and it is routinely described as the Silicon Valley of hardware.

An engineering publication based in Shenzhen sits inside that ecosystem rather than observing it from a capital city. Its readers design phones, drones, vehicles, industrial equipment and consumer electronics in the Pearl River Delta, source components from the city's markets and suppliers, and attend the industry's exhibitions in the city's convention venues. AspenCore's decision to stage its flagship China exhibition and summits in Shenzhen, rather than Beijing or Shanghai, reflects the same calculation.

The Guangdong base also positions the edition for the supply-chain story. Shenzhen's trade is dominated by electromechanical products, including smartphones, printed circuit boards and integrated circuits, and the city's factories and distributors are where global component shortages, price movements and export shifts are felt first. Coverage produced there can report those movements from direct local knowledge.

Events: IIC Shenzhen, summits and awards

The edition's publisher runs the International IC & Component Exhibition and Conference, known as IIC Shenzhen, organised by AspenCore as the publisher of EE Times, EE Times China and other electronics publications. The 2025 edition was held on 25 and 26 November 2025 at the Sheraton Shenzhen Futian Hotel, with an innovation product showcase, technical exchanges, high-level summits and specialist forums covering IC design, EDA and IP, IoT, AI, automotive electronics, green energy, smart manufacturing and wireless connectivity.

Within IIC sit two summits. The Global CEO Summit brings semiconductor and technology chief executives and academics together; its 2025 theme was digital embodiment, and earlier editions concentrated on edge computing and edge intelligence, with speakers from global and Chinese semiconductor companies and live streaming in English and Chinese. The Global Distribution & Supply Chain Leaders Summit, themed in 2025 on the diversity of the supply-chain ecosystem, covers the distribution side of the industry.

Two award ceremonies accompany the summits. The World Electronics Achievement Awards honour enterprises and executives who have made outstanding contributions to innovation in the global electronics industry, with winners selected by a judging panel of AspenCore senior analysts together with online voters from Asia, the Americas and Europe. The Global Electronic Component Distributor Awards recognise achievement in component distribution. For EE Times China's readers, these events are the offline extension of the site: the same companies and engineers they read about in Chinese appear on stage in Shenzhen.

Role in China's electronics industry

EE Times China's role is connective. It connects a Chinese engineering readership, working in the world's densest electronics design and manufacturing region, to a global media network that has covered the industry since 1972; it connects component makers and distributors to the engineers who specify their parts; and it connects China's design community to the industry's own institutions, its summits, exhibitions and awards, in its own language and its own city.

That position has grown more significant as China's electronics industry has moved from assembly towards original design and semiconductor development. A design industry needs design media: technically literate journalism, design technique, market research and professional community in the language its engineers work in. EE Times China, as the Chinese edition of one of the industry's oldest titles and part of the AspenCore network, is one of the established providers of exactly that, published from Shenzhen for the engineers of the Pearl River Delta and beyond.